Council candidates participate in forum
(Editor’s note: this is the first of two parts on the City Council Candidates Forum. The second part will be featured in Friday’s edition of The Recorder).
The Porterville Chamber of Commerce hosted a Candidate Forum at Porterville City Hall on Wednesday
District 1 Incumbent Lawana Tate, District 1 Candidate Raymond Beltran, District 2 Candidate Greg Meister, and District 2 Candidate Jason Gurrola participated in the forum.
Tate said she was raised and educated in Porterville. She said she is interested in promoting and developing businesses in Porterville. She would really like to see many of the projects the city has begun over the past year to be completed. “I really would like to retain my seat so we can reach the finish line,” she said.
She added one reason why she ran for the council was to achieve her goal of improving the infrastructure, including the roads in the city.
Beltran spoke about the community schools, and leadership, and said that there is not a lot of transparency about what is going on in the community. Beltran runs his Facebook page Porterville FYI, and he said he sees frustration about what is going on in the community, and says finding information is difficult.
Meister said he is proud to have been endorsed by Dennis Townsend, Devon Mathis, Shannon Grove, and Kevin Mccarthy.
Gurrola said his life and family are in Porterville. He said he will continue the leadership, looking at where we come from, and where we are now. He said he wants to have an impact
Question 1: Please share your previous involvement in the community and relevance to be a city council member?
Beltran has worked with non-profits in Porterville, the school district, and his personal involvement with his church, helping hands, Kiwanis. He’s working extensively with Toys for Tots, and is civic oriented. He was involved with library programs for teens, the Porterville Museum, and community clean ups. He said, “My family and I have been involved in the churches and other city groups, and non-profits for years. (PACC for example.)
Meister spoke about coaching basketball, softball, and other sports. He helped clean up 30,000 pounds of trash with the help of Beltran. He is involved in Tulare Coalition for Freedom to fight back against unconstitutional actions. He said he created Freedom Rallies and more than 100 people turned up at each event in Tulare, Visalia, Exeter. (Among the sponsors of the rallies are the Tulare County Coalition for Freedom, Unmask Tulare County and Porterville’s Blessings of Liberty.) He spoke about fighting for our constitutional rights.
Gurrola said he’d been working with Porterville Distribution Center for 27 years and had been involved with the community, coaching sports throughout town, volunteering, and was heavily involved with Parks and Leisure. He spoke about the Porterville library being a place where kids could grow, and his sorrow at the loss of the library. He said he is really involved with kids in the community.
Tate spoke about her family’s community involvement through the years. She said she has always supported the Family Crisis Center, and other organizations in the community.
Tate did credit the vaccine incentive program approved by the council in playing a huge role in helping the city recover from the pandemic. She volunteered at many Vaccine Roundups and at the Community Vaccine Clinic. She spoke about the vaccine incentives at community events. As part of the program residents were given $100 gift cards to local businesses to be vaccinated. The program was funded by federal American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds the city received.
As a result, the city distributed about $1.8 million in ARP funds through the vaccination incentive program. “We were able to pump a lot of money back into the community,” she said.
At the end of her remarks, she asked, “What would the City do without all that money?”
2. Business question: Given the struggles many businesses faced from the COVID shutdown, what incentives, policies or actions would you take to improve the situation?
Meister said he was pro business, and the small businesses donate graciously to events. They make our community what it is today, he said, unlike giant corporations. “Over the past 2 years we’ve seen our small businesses come under attack,” he said.
Gurrola said what troubled him was the impact on the small businesses by the pandemic, the regulations. He said the smaller businesses support the city and the community. He spoke about moving forward and businesses promoting higher paying jobs, that would mean growth in the community.
Tate spoke about the bottom line, saying that our businesses are governed by state and federal mandates, and she said, “I have confidence that the vaccine was successful.
“But COVID caused a lot of mental health issues and it is still there. We need to continue to practice safety, and we are not keeping track of the numbers.”
Tate did take issue with Meister and said we are not out of the pandemic yet.
Beltran said that we were not required by law to follow all the mandates for COVID and we couldn’t expect the small Mom and Pop businesses to keep up.
Downtown needs a lot of help, he said. “I spoke with five different business owners. And it was very difficult for them. Regulations created problems. Tulare and Visalia are growing at a much faster rate.”
3rd question Homelessness: Given the impact on local business on Main Street and local waterways such as Tule River, what incentives, policies or actions would you take to improve these situations, not only for the community, but for those experiencing homelessness?
Gurrola spoke about the Navigation Shelter, and said that Parks and Leisure go into the waterways monthly, as well as the police and social workers to help the homeless. It is a continued effort to alleviate the problem as much as possible.
Tate said there are a lot of people who are victims of the system, and often they are not capable of understanding . . ., not just the homeless, but people who’ve lost their jobs, and we need to help them.
“We have a situation where they have to be taken care of, when I worked at PDC - we had a lot of empty beds. Why not transition them back into a safe facility? It is costing millions of dollars just to keep the lights on. And (this situation) is all over the world.”
Beltran - “This isn’t just a mental health situation, there are working families that have a job. It’s both mental health and substance abuse. There are lots of organizations that (can help these people.)
“I believe that many of these people come from out of the area, and Porterville is not getting their share subsidies to (combat the problem.)” He mentioned the Navigation Center in Porterville.
Meister spoke next about the homeless problem in Porterville, and said he talked to small business owners about the problem. He talked about cleaning the river, and the homeless living in the parks, and near the schools. Then he started talking about Porterville paying a 9.25% sales tax, higher than San Francisco. And Porterville has the highest homeless population in Tulare County, and they are coming from Bakersfield and Fresno.